Whereas Anneke Mulder Bakker (Low Countries) and Pauline L'Hermite-Leclercq (France) present broad-ranging, theoretically informed overviews of research into anchoritic practice that raise broader issues and questions for the field in general, other contributors concentrate more specifically on aspects of eremitic life for a particular region.

Monastics practiced a variety of asceticisms as typified by itinerant monks who wandered, eremitic monks who adopted a wide range of seclusion, and monks who sought a formalized community by residing within an enclosed built environment.

hesychia: stillness, quiet, rest) has its historical roots in the eremitic spirituality of the Desert Fathers who sought to cultivate in the wastelands of Egypt and Palestine that "purity of heart" extolled in the Gospels: "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.

Ian Holgate takes up the vital subject of female patronage in his comparative investigation of the Venetian cult of Monica, and, finally, Roberto Cobianchi provides persuasive evidence for an eremitic, artistic "way of being-in-the-world" (I quote Clifford Geertz), for the Hermits of Citta di Castello guided Raphael's archaizing celestial coronation of San Nicola in his early altarpiece for Sant'Agostino.

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